Martensite is beautiful not boring !!!....BTW Kevin , do you know anyone who marquenches then uses plates to make sure there is no warpage ???
While this is indeed beautiful and what you want to see in blades:
Whole pieces comprised of nothing but is boring to look at compared to this:
Which is very interesting, but also very ugly to have in your blade, which falls right in line with the thread topic, the stuff in the top photo is going to out-perform the stuff in the bottom in every category except unpredictability, and this happens to both be images of 1095, a steel that loves to give you the bottom stuff if you don’t really stay on top of it.
Mete, I don’t know of anybody who uses plates in conjunction with martempering, probably because of the total effectiveness of straightening metastable austenitic blades with gloved hands. I have always been dubious of using plates to keep steel, prone to warping, straight with plates, cooling air hardening steels for hardening they are very effective for. But if the steel wants to warp it is due to uneven internal stress/strain, simply holding it straight without applying force in the opposite direction has only resulted in it assuming its distortion as soon as the straightener is removed for me. I believe rather than holding steel straight the plates would lend a more even distribution of cooling down both sides and thus result in straighter blades, but I haven’t tried it, since my gloves are always sitting right there.
Cybrok mete is a metallurgist, I am not a metallurgist but I play one on T.V.
. If you haven’t got to the metallography portion of your schooling, it is really cool
. Preparation is painfully boring but the viewing is worth it. If you can get the e-book by Verhoeven that has been recommended you will have perhaps the only book that touches on bladesmithing from metallurgical perspective.
The touchiness of this topic comes from the mass confusion in the field about these properties and how they really work. My guess to the origins of this is still just my opinion, but is backed by my talking to some folks who were around many years ago and observing the trends. It would appear that back when forged blades where the extreme minority in a stock removal world, some forgers decided to call upon the ancient and traditional means of forging as a selling point for knives. A very wise business strategy, considering that is how most blades were made until the industrial revolution, and appealing to tradition is a very good marketing angle when dealing with something that is handmade. Where they got into trouble is when that wasn’t good enough, it is natural that whenever a P.R. machine gets rolling the truth will often get stretched to the breaking point in constraining its momentum. All kinds of claims were then made as to the superiority of forged blades over stock removal. This is where those folks got themselves in a bind, since knives are meant to cut things and a stock removal knife will cut things just fine and with less chance for things to go wrong in the creation, so us bladesmiths needed come up with a way to top the stock removers, so when in doubt – just change the rules.
While stock removers were still focused on making knives that will cut things, bladesmiths decided, that instead of educating or correcting that percentage of folks who misuse and abuse their tools, they would cater to that mentality and changed the focus to prybars instead of cutting instruments. Even stranger, they did this with tests that most grinders with common sense would not make a knife to pass, tests that involved extreme ductility in ways that make things rather useless as a prybar
.
The marketing worked beautifully! It was a masterstroke of P.R. that any modern political campaign would be in awe of. It wasn’t long before folks were intentionally doing all kinds of things to make a knife that bent like taffy, with resisting a bend or even cutting things as an afterthought. Even better, you had consumers abusing knives in all kinds of ridiculous ways that made the ground blade, designed for cutting, completely unreliable. As a marketing campaign you have to admire it.
Also before anybody takes umbrage or runs to defense of their favorite forger, they should get over themselves, since this trend got its start so long ago that no living person can realistically lay claim to the invention of the soft spine. We can appeal to historical things like Japanese swords, but we must do so while ignoring the subsequent development of controlled alloying, since those ancient techniques were in response to the inherent limitations of the materials of the time, as well as overlooking that swords are not knives.
Another book to get your hands on, if you can read German, is "Messerklingen und Stahl" by Roman Landes. Roman has an entire chapter devoted to how much real knife performance has been sacrificed in order to compensate for abuse.
